I find myself largely in agreement with David Byrne (from the Talking Heads) about urban planning but I think this joke could use some work:

There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way around you’re in hell.

The way I heard the joke it was much more complicated and in heaven the French are the cooks, the Germans are the engineers, the British are the police, the Swiss are the bankers, and the Italians are the lovers whereas in hell the French are the bankers, the Germans are the police, the British are the cooks, the Swiss are the lovers, and the Italians are the engineers.

This slight variant on my version has “managers” instead of “bankers” which strikes me as a little bit odd. At any rate, I’m pleased to report that modern-day Germany seems very well-policed. Indeed, Germany has one of the lowest murder rates in the world.

The recent financial crisis has provoked a lot of interesting discussions about the state of macroeconomic theory, and one aspect of this that I’ve been interested in is the revelation (to me) that a lot of the macro theory of the past 30-40 years has been driven by a sense that a theory is no good unless it has “micro-foundations.” This is interesting to me largely because while I can’t do hard math like a real economist, this is closely related to things people talk about in philosophy classes. At any rate, John Quiggin, pushing back against the micro-foundation trend, writes:

If we are to develop a macroeconomic theory that can help us to understand, and hopefully prevent the recurrence of, crises like the current one, and help us to improve policy responses, economics must take a different road from that it has followed since the 1970s. The appealing idea that macroeconomics should develop naturally from standard microeconomic foundations must be recognised as a distraction. In its place, we must accept, in the language of systems theory that macroeconomic phenomena are emergent, arising from complex interactions of behaviors we do not fully understand, but must nevertheless respond to.

I think this is the wrong way to generate that conclusion. What I think Quiggin ought to say is that macroeconomic theory needs to distinguish between two different kinds of questions about foundations. One is a somewhat metaphysical issue about whether or not it’s the case that macroeconomic propositions are ultimately reducible to microeconomic phenomena. This is related to issues about whether or not mental processes are ultimately reducible to biological processes in the brain (or does the mental supervenes on the physical without being reducible to it) whether moral facts can be reduced to physical ones (as in Cornell realism) and so forth.

The other—and quite different—issue is a methodological question about whether it really makes sense to demand that macroeconomists produce microfoundations for their theories. We learned a great deal about chemistry before we understood the structure of the atom in detail. When Darwin proposed evolution by natural selection, he couldn’t provide the genetic microfoundations the theory required. And when Mendel pioneered genetics, he couldn’t provide the chemical microfoundations that the discovery of DNA provided later. As it happens, microfoundations have been discovered for most of this stuff. But the theories weren’t initially accepted because they had strong microfoundations, they were accepted because they worked well as theories on their own terms. A macroeconomic theory that’s based in elegant microfoundations but that doesn’t actually explain the economy well is useless. But that doesn’t require you to commit yourself to any strong claims about the ultimate metaphysical status of the discipline.

Job Voyager is a cool tool that lets you see the share of the American workforce that’s been in different job categories over time. Behold the rise and fall of the secretary:

Voicemail, email, cell phones, smart phones, and laptops are rapidly making this occupational category obsolete. Also interesting to note that as of Mad Men‘s 1963 we still hadn’t arrived at Peak Secretary occurred in the 1970 Census and secretaries were a larger proportion of the population in 1990 than they had been in 1950.